I CONSUME, THEREFORE I AM
It has been almost nine years since the Great Recession descended upon us. We are told we have recovered since then, though why so slowly economists cannot tell us, and neither can the U.S. presidential candidates now holding forth.
Under the circumstances, can a man or woman of letters express an opinion? Not that we would want to invade anyone’s turf. On the other hand, my own favourite economists aren’t economists at all, but authors who seem to have a very good grasp of things. In The Birth of Modernism by English professor Leon Surette, for example, I come across the following two schools of economy: scarcity economics, a philosophy by which we must save and husband our resources carefully, and “underconsumptionism,” which holds that prosperity depends upon the fluid – nay, profligate – dispersal of resources. “On this view, expenditure on monumental and artistic activities is not only culturally valuable,” Surette observes, “but also promotes general well-being.”
Scarcity economics appeals to the bourgeoisie, who were scandalized, writes James Livingston, author of Against Thrift, by those who produced more than they needed. Livingston proclaims, “To heal ourselves, we need to spend more freely ... Since the 1980s, the system as a whole has been awash in redundant profits.” The answer to our present economic doldrums, if there is one, is to embrace consumerism.
But isn’t consumerism wicked? It’s consumerism that rouses the guilt of buying things for yourself – lovely, comfortable things – while the Poor wait outside your door. And if the Poor are not sufficient, you can go back in time to the Protestant Work Ethic to teach you not to be a parasite, enjoying things you have not made.
For Livingston, however, consumption is more than a pleasure. “Most acts of consumption are motivated and saturated by sensuous pleasures,” he asserts. It was gourmet pioneers such as James Beard and Julia Child, he points out, who reinvented American cuisine, “providing consumers with new ideas, foreign possibilities, and different promises, and, by the same token, equipping them with alternatives to industrialized food.”
Now that was a great day for consumerism.